William, I am not clear whether you re withdrawing your proposal or just
clarifying what part of the document the statement should be in. I will
therefore leave it in the agenda, but ask that you clarify what you meant
before we discuss it.
Charles
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, William Loughborough wrote:
In today's agenda (3/24/99) is a proposal I apparently made to add a
guideline or checkpoint requiring mouseless operation. This is not the
appropriate place for such a GL.
One of the problems we are having with formulating a set of section 3
guidelines is that the overall WAI effort is so strongly focused on the
content of the Web being accessible and the effort to ensure
interaction, whether in the usual sense of being able to fill out forms
or obtain information, etc., has been relegated to a few entries in the
UAGL document and some references to (mostly external) general software
accessibility documents.
In the case of authoring tools, whether full-blown Website
creators/managers or trivial "save as HTML" aspects of "mainstream"
applications, this is causing endless discussion about whether the
referred-to sources adequately address the concerns of would-be authors
in the PWD community or if we might not serve our aims better by
preparing a comprehensive set of guidelines addressing all software
interfaces.
I'm pretty sure that the intent of the charter of WAI is to promote
access to the Web in both the usual passive sense of reading what's
there (and navigating through it easily) and in the sense of
participating by posting stuff to the Web and securing employment as
designers and masters of Websites. So far there is little guidance for
the latter and our section 3 is beginning to confront this issue
head-on, and it hasn't been pretty, e.g. it has been suggested that we
do nothing about this since 99% of the PWD population will benefit from
the AUWG effort to ensure that content is accessible and *only* 1% can
benefit from accessiblity of the tools. We are revisiting the "I never
see anybody in wheelchairs using curb cuts" attitude.
So after all this "diatribe" what I am actually proposing is that we
somehow begin (in whatever is an appropriate WG) making access to all
things Web a mandate. When we talk ER we must remember that the tools
generated must be usable by everybody. This is so obvious in AU and UA
that the links to others' work just simply won't do.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
http://dicomp.pair.com
--Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992 http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS - 545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139, USA